The Inheritance - Part I
Years ago, I consulted with a local psychic who told me there’d be “problems with an inheritance.” I had no idea what he was talking about and tossed the comment off as random. Little did I know, my ex husband, an eccentric Czech photographer who lived in London, was worth a small fortune. So when he died, I learned that the psychic’s prediction would come true. Because that’s when our family was introduced to a hostile Russian woman named Vera who would harass our family for years.
THIS IS PART 1 of a FIVE-PART STORY
Gharith Pendragon
Many years ago, when I lived in London, I was married to a well-known and eccentric Czech photographer who traveled the world taking photos of ancient sites, monuments, art collections and hard-to-get-to, exotic places that most people have never even heard of. He was a good deal older than I was, and eventually I left him because the marriage had irretrievably broken down. A number of years passed; I moved back to the States and remarried, started a new family with someone closer to my own age. What I didn’t know was that my photographer husband, Werner Forman, had accrued quite a bit of money during his time, much of it parked in a bank in Australia. He was worth a small fortune – who would have guessed?
During my second marriage, I moved to Austin, Texas and became something of a hippie, joining the ecstatic dance community and exploring my spiritual side, taking Ayahuasca drug trips and smoking a lot of pot. Through someone at dance, I heard of a psychic named Gharith Pendragon (an unlikely but suitable name) and decided to consult him – not that there was anything I specifically wanted to learn; I was just curious. At the time, Gharith lived in a small apartment off Burnet Road. I went to see him and was astonished by his looks: tall, white-haired and awkward, with a birthmark on his forehead that he said came from a bullet wound in a previous life. He was an odd guy, with a habit of swaying his head back and forth like a blind person trying to take in his surroundings with unseeing eyes. Even though he worked with the police on criminal cases, there was something very innocent about him (stuffed animals lined his shelves and a whole wall was dedicated to letters of gratitude from people whose troubles he had helped untangle.) From Gharith I learned there would be problems with an inheritance.
I had no idea whose inheritance he was talking about and tossed the comment off as random. But it turned out Gharith was right.
Before I left the marriage, Werner and I had had a daughter together, a little girl named Jofka, and it was she who would struggle – and struggle mightily – with an inheritance.
Werner was a hoarder. He and I had bought a house together in West Hampstead, a little two up, two down terraced house with the bathroom on the ground floor. When I left the marriage, I left a lot of my possessions behind, but the place was orderly and nicely put together, very attractive to the eye. When I returned to visit many years later, the house was so stuffed with hoarded books, clothing and artifacts that it was impossible to put a foot in the door. Werner himself had been forced to move out into a residential hotel in Golders Green. And there he met the person who caused so much trouble with inheritances.